No one needs to face MS alone. In communities across Canada, the MS Society provides information, support, educational events and other resources for people living with MS and their families. Learn more about the programs and services we offer. Researchers funded by the MS Society are working to find the cause of MS , develop better treatments with less side effects, and ultimately cure the disease for everyone who is affected by it.
Learn more about the research we fund. Despite decades of research, the cause of MS remains a mystery. The best current evidence suggests that lifestyle, environmental, genetic and biological factors all contribute. All these areas are being actively examined. While it is most often diagnosed in adults aged 20 to 49, younger children and older adults are also diagnosed with the disease. In Canada, 43 is the average age of MS diagnosis. Women are three times more likely to be diagnosed with MS than men.
MS often develops slowly, and the symptoms may not appear right away. To reach a confirmed diagnosis of MS, the neurologist may employ additional tests, such as a Magnetic Resonance Imaging MRI scan which looks for tissue damage in the brain. The severity of MS, progression and specific symptoms cannot be predicted at the time of diagnosis.
Read more information for those newly diagnosed with MS. Some people with RRMS will eventually transition to a state in which relapses and remissions no longer occur. Symptoms may persist and disability slowly and continually increases. Individuals who accumulate disability and experience worsening of symptoms right from the start are diagnosed with primary progressive MS.
MS is thought to be an autoimmune disease, which means the immune system - designed to protect against intruders such as viruses and bacteria - attacks tissues in the body. In the case of MS, the tissue that is targeted is myelin. MS is also considered an invisible disease. This is because many of the symptoms experienced by patients are internal and are not always visible to outsiders. As a disease in people, MS works very much like a lamp does, explains Lee.
First, you have the light bulb, which represents the brain, and the chord, which represents your nerves running into an electrical outlet.
Those with MS have unravelled chords, preventing the electricity from moving throughout the body properly. Visible symptoms, however, are typically seen in patients with more debilitating forms of the disease. They might use a cane or electric wheelchair when their balance is affected.
Other symptoms that can manifest include tremors, temporary hearing loss, gait like difficulty walking , difficulty swallowing and mental health issues like depression.
Lee discusses why MS can be a difficult disease to diagnose. These symptoms can come on unexpectedly and without warning as attack triggers often differ from patient to patient. Garrido experienced how unpredictable those attacks can be at Christmas in when he had to be hospitalized for two days. Patients are told to manage their MS through a healthy diet and exercise regime. Some patients may be put on disease-modifying therapies that most often come in the form of pills or injections, Lee says.
These treatments are used to slow down the progression of the disease and prevent or limit future attacks. Today we have 14 disease-modifying therapies on the market. There is no cure for MS.
While people may die as a result of complications from multiple sclerosis, patients do not directly pass away from multiple sclerosis itself. The severity in which people experience the symptoms is related to the type of MS they have. However, RRMS — the type both Howe and Garrido live with — is typically referred to as the technical and first official stage of MS and is most commonly diagnosed.
It is often described as unpredictable but is clearly defined by relapses. This is when symptoms appear or existing ones become worse. In between these relapses, recovery is complete or nearly complete to what the body was before remission the pre-relapse function , the MS Society of Canada explains.
Over time the relapses and remissions become less apparent and the disease begins a steady progress of decline with occasional plateaus.
Lastly is PPMS, the most debilitating form of the disease. It is a slow accumulation of disability, the MS Society of Canada explains, and does not come with defined relapses. The patients will undergo specialized neck scans to look for narrowed veins.
Health officials consider a country to have a "high" rate if they have more than 30 cases per , The incidence among the provinces varies, from a high of cases for every , people in the Prairies to a low of cases per , in Quebec, according to a study by researchers at the University of Calgary.
However, that doesn't explain why the disease is nearly absent among Canada's Inuit in the High Arctic and among indigenous people in North America and Australia, or why it is rarely found in Japan. The study on the rising incidence of women with MS was done by a team of researchers led by George Ebers, a professor of neurology at the University of Oxford. It appears in the November issue of the journal Lancet Neurology. The higher incidence of MS among women may not be bad news, according to the researchers — because it may help to shed light on what causes the disease.
Because it has to be in the environment: your genes don't change over two generations, three generations. There has also been speculation that because MS is generally more prevalent in colder climates far north of the equator and far south of the equator, it may be due to vitamin D deficiencies.
The body produces the vitamin in response to sunlight and so vitamin D levels fall off in colder countries and in winter because the sun's rays aren't intense enough.
Because of the rising incidence of MS among women and because it seems to have started in the s, many others have speculated that the cause may be connected to higher levels of the hormone estrogen due to the introduction of the birth control pill.
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